Results tagged “Youtube” from Birmingham Post - Lifestyle Blog

Lots of debate over a literature exam at Cambridge in which final year students were asked to compare an Amy Winehouse lyric to a poem by Sir Walter Raleigh.

I can vividly recall the horror and/or amusement of commentators and critics in the late 60s when it became known that the words of Bob Dylan (right) songs were being subjected to academic analysis and postgrads were doing MAs and doctorates based on his work and cultural significance.

Oh woe is me as I find myself living in a country devoid of Youtube. I never thought of myself as an internet dependent individual, but am in absolutely no denial about my addiction to British broadcasting. Namely, Eastenders.

You may think it's rather sad that despite the fact that I live in the most culturally rich country in the entire world, I still feel compelled to hear some cockney banter and watch sensationally far-fetched storylines. But what can I say, this was my reality touchstone, however unrealistic.

But now, it has been taken away from us in China.

All but his most hardened fans may have given up waiting for a return to his "funny ones", but no-one mythologises a city like Woody. If you take a trip to New York there's a scene from a film at every intersection, but it's Woody's Manhattan that uses the city as a character, the narration making it okay to be "too romantic" about what's really just some bricks and some people.

London is casually used as a backdrop and there now seems to be a whole industry in making films about late seventies Manchester, but not it seems Birmingham.

Supposed worst film ever The Sex Lives of the Potato Men was set, but not filmed, in Brum, Cliff Richard sang and bargee-d around the canals in Take Me High, but these are not the stuff myths are made of. The closest we come to a classic is The Italian Job, the drain the Minis race down is actually the Birmingham-Coventry Tithebarn main sewer and even that was up the Coventry end.